PETER WERNICK. Born 1946

Transcript of OH 1489V

This interview was recorded on December 20, 2007, for the Maria Rogers Oral History Program. The interviewer is Anne Dyni. The interview also is available in video format, filmed by Liz McCutcheon. The interview was transcribed by Dee Baron.

NOTE: The interviewer’s questions and comments appear in parentheses. Added material appears in brackets.

ABSTRACT: player talks about his career as a musician, ranging from playing bluegrass in New York City during the 1960s to playing banjo with on the David Letterman Show in 2005, as well as the many professional successes he has had in between, most notably as a member of the bluegrass , which played together for twelve years and has continued to play highly popular reunion shows.

[A].

00:00 (Today is December 20th, 2007. I’m interviewing Pete Wernick of 7930 Oxford Road in Niwot. Pete, when and where were you born?)

New York City, February 25, 1946.

(Do you have any brothers or sisters?)

My one and only sister just passed away about a month ago.

(Oh, I’m sorry.)

She was my older sister. Her name was Sarah and she lived in Boston.

(Was she a musician?)

Not at all. No. She was a writer and collaborated on various books including medical books.

(Were there any instruments in your family at all?)

My dad always had an interest in music and from his childhood he played harmonica by ear, and that was the one instrument he would take out at gatherings and so on and played on a pretty rudimentary level. But he always liked it, and he was interested in music, and he would acquire instruments. So as I was growing up I was aware that there was a banjo in the house. There was also a ; there was also bongo drums; there was a violin;

Page 1 of 18 there was an accordion. They were all cheap instruments that my dad had accumulated at auctions and things like that. When I developed an interest in the banjo, I remembered there was banjo in the house. That was what I started playing on was this banjo made in the late 1800s that had been slightly refurbished after he acquired it. That’s what I started on.

[Hands Wernick an instrument] (This is the instrument that you play today.)

Well, it’s an instrument. This is a very rudimentary—it’s like a beginner instrument. [Strums guitar] It’s a lot closer to what I started with than what I play as my main instrument today. It’s a very simple—you know the early that were made were gourds, you know, chopped in half and then like a cat’s skin or something sort of attached onto it like a drum and then with the addition of a neck and the strings, you’d have stringed instrument. In the 1800s they figured out that they could make this kind of hooped arrangement here, so that’s banjos have been for 150 or more years.

Mine is like this but it also has lots of other features including a piece of bell brass laid in here called a tone ring which makes it louder and brighter and then a whole additional piece on the back called a resonator which makes a bigger, louder sound. Before the days of amplification, those were important developments because a banjo had to be loud to keep up with the sounds of brass instruments in a marching band or something like that. The loudness factor is less necessary now because you can be heard with microphones, but the tonal character that those changes made are part of what the bluegrass bands’ sounds are all about now.

But I have this in the living room because it’s quiet. You can do this [strums banjo] when somebody is even napping or on the phone. When I’m practicing with my full out way of practicing, you couldn’t do anything else in the same room while I’m there, which is what caused me to build a practice cabin over 100 yards from the house. And even then, my wife sometimes says she can hear me practicing even when I’m facing away from the house inside the cabin—it still makes plenty of sound.

(Who makes this instrument versus who makes the one—?)

This is called the “good time banjo.” It’s probably the most popular starting banjo now being made. It’s made in California by the Deering Company and the one I play for my main instrument is made by Gibson. The Gibson Mastertone is sort of the standard, top- of-the-line model that a lot of pros use, and I’ve had the one that I’ve been playing since 1988. I had a similar one, an older one, made in the ‘30s that I played for over 20 years prior to that, also a Gibson Masterone.

04:29 (How old were you when you really got into playing the banjo?)

Well, I had had a little bit of interest and actually a couple of banjo lessons when I was something like twelve, but I wasn’t that interested in taking the lessons and that didn’t take me very far, and I discontinued it. But when I was fourteen-and-a-half or so, I was

Page 2 of 18 in a period of my life where I had friends there in the Bronx where I was growing up who were into and would sing and play folk just around the house, at parties and whatnot.

One of those friends offered to show me a few phrases on the banjo. He says, “You like banjo, you want to learn how to play some?” So he showed me that and I went home and got out my dad’s old banjo and started practicing on it. And it fit right into my social need structure at the time. It was a way of getting attention and fitting in, and I liked it besides. And I immediately got a big head for practicing, and I made a decision which I’ve heard tell other people making a similar decision which is, “If I practice enough on this thing, people are going to have to pay attention. If I get good enough, they’ll just have to pay attention.” And I thought, “I can do that.” And I did.

At the time there was an instruction book by Pete Seeger that a lot of people used, but it had its limitations. It did not show anything useful about how to play the three-finger bluegrass style that was played by Earl Scruggs, which is the kind of banjo-playing that turned me on the most. My sister got me, for my 15th birthday, a couple of records of Scruggs, the Flatt and Scruggs band. And then I had examples of exactly what I wanted to sound like in the house, and the only trouble was I didn’t have anybody to show me how to make that happen. So, using the rudiments that I was already learning from my friends about just how to follow chord changes, I was able to at least piece together a few elements and figure out ways of somewhat duplicating the sounds I was hearing. With a great deal of commitment and extended effort, I got closer and closer.

By the time I was graduating high school—I graduated pretty young, I was just past my 16th birthday when I graduated high school. For my high school graduation, I combined money that I had with money I got from my parents, and I was able to get my first Gibson Mastertone banjo. So, at the age of 16, I was kind of launched at that point, and I was getting good enough that I could play with other people and perform a little bit.

In New York City, one might think, how do you get started as a banjo player? But it’s such a big city that anything you’re interested in, there’ll be some other people interested in that, and if it’s one in a million, well, then, in the New York metropolitan area, that’s 16 people. And that’s about, actually, the number of very committed blue grass people there were in the New York area and I was able to find them. There was a collecting point, sort of. There’s a park in lower Manhattan called Washington Square Park and there was just starting a tradition of people who were getting together to jam, play informally, on Sunday afternoons, and I would go down there on the subway with my banjo, and I would meet people and some of them I’m still friends with, the people that I met down there. And there’s some really good musicians. And they were part of my motivation to play.

I went to college in Manhattan, I went to Columbia College and there were some musicians of different types that I met around there and got into trying to find other people to play bluegrass with. By the time I was a little bit into college, I had a little bluegrass band and then I got to do a bluegrass radio program on my college FM radio

Page 3 of 18 station. I had the only bluegrass radio program in New York City during the 1960s. I had one hour, and then it became a two hour show called Bluegrass Breakdown, heard on Saturday mornings. My listener area included the entire New York City area so there are still people I run into who say they remember hearing me as a DJ in college and that was a major part of my education because I was able to acquire records to play on my show and I also got access to the famous stars of bluegrass. If you asked them for an interview and they knew you were a DJ, they would be happy to agree to an interview. So, when I was 18 and 19 and 20 years old, I got to interview some of the most famous bluegrass musicians of the day.

(Including who?)

Bill Monroe, the father of bluegrass. I did an entire hour-long program with him, interviewing him and his side musicians. In the previous year, 1965, when I was 19, I went down to Roanoke, Virginia—or Fincastle, Virginia, to be exact—where the very first Bluegrass Festival ever was held in 1965. And at that festival, I interviewed Don Reno, and that interview can still be heard. You can go to YouTube and hear my interview with Don Reno [chuckles]. It’s not a video interview, but it’s on there. And Jimmy Martin, one of the top singers of all time of bluegrass. And another person, a very important figure in bluegrass who died the following year, and so I have one of the few recorded interviews with him—Carter Stanley, who is the brother of Ralph Stanley, who is still around. They were the Stanley Brothers, and he was the lead singer and for the Stanley Brothers. So my own oral history collection of bluegrass is pretty rich. At some point, I’ll be arranging with the Bluegrass Museum in Kentucky to have them get copies of all that stuff.

10:32 (Was Earl Scruggs still around when you were doing that?)

Earl Scruggs is still around now. At the time he was sort of divorced a little bit from the bluegrass scene. There were sort of feuds going on, and Flatt and Scruggs were sort of above the rest of the bluegrass scene, which was in kind of bad financial straits and not doing so well. But Flatt and Scruggs were a big hit as a folk group, and they were playing a lot on the college circuit. I was there in 1962 when they filled Carnegie Hall and made a famous live record at Carnegie Hall. They went to Japan, and they did the Beverly Hillbillies theme. They were very, very popular. They were not invited to any of the first bluegrass festivals, because they were at odds with Bill Monroe, the father of bluegrass, who was the central figure.

(Could I ask you to just kind of work through your initial chording?)

[Strums banjo] Yeah, I do this once in a while because it’s part—it’s interesting for people who don’t know about bluegrass and banjo styles. It also works in an instructional way because there’s a long way from how you start on the banjo to where you sound like Earl Scruggs.

Page 4 of 18 The very first thing you do is you learn chords and the banjo is tuned to an open chord so it’s a G chord. [strums banjo] Easy as could be.

Second chord, two fingers. And I now have list of over 60 songs can be just played with two chords. Pretty famous songs. You know, [sings] “Hang down your head Tom Dooley, hang down your head and cry, hang down your head Tom Dooley, poor boy you’re bound to die.” There’s a whole bunch of pretty well known songs that just use two chords.

And when you have three chords, most bluegrass songs only have three chords. They’re not always done in the key of G, but you can choose to do them in the key of G, and then you can sing the entire bluegrass repertoire, or 80 percent of it, using nothing more than that much technique. So there’s a very low to the ground rung of the ladder that makes this instrument accessible to everybody.

But the thing that makes everybody want to play it is not hearing somebody go like this [strums two chords on banjo] but because they’re hearing something fancier. Now I don’t have my gear here, my finger picks are—

[Joan Wernick in background:] (Do you want me to go get it?)

Well, if you want to go get the finger picks, yeah.

[Joan:] (I’d be glad to. Would you like to hear that?)

(Yeah.)

Okay. The basic style that people hear that makes them interested in the banjo and has had a lot to do with the banjo’s popularity in the last 50 or 60 years is the three-finger picking style of Earl Scruggs. And when you put on these finger picks, metal picks and plastic thumb pick, you get a lot stronger sound than with just the bare fingers [picks banjo a bit]. And with a different kind of banjo that I’ve talked about, that’s another couple of quantum leaps in the same direction. [more banjo picking] But, for instance, Earl Scrugg’s most popular tune is “Foggy Mountain Breakdown” [plays part of Foggy Mountain Breakdown] and then his other very, very, very famous piece [plays part of the Beverly Hillbillies theme]. So that style’s called Scruggs’ Style—Three-Finger Picking—and it’s pretty much a necessary component of what’s called .

There’s gonna be bluegrass music that should include a banjo, the banjo would be played in this style. So when I learned how to play this style of banjo, the thing to do was to look for other bluegrass musicians to play with. To break down how it works—once you’ve learned how to make chords with your left hand, you can learn some simple roll patterns, they’re called roll patterns. So here’s a four note pattern [plays four notes], just four notes: one, two, three, four [plays faster] and to learn how to do it faster and combine it with something in the left hand [demonstrates combination on banjo]. So, to

Page 5 of 18 keep things going with your left hand, there’s a lot more than just one pattern. You have to learn how to manage a number of patterns and keep the rhythm going the whole time.

15:48 Anyway, when you manage those different patterns, you have to learn—a lot of what happens in the right hand has to go into the unconscious brain, kind of the way a person learns language. You can’t be thinking about every single part of speech and concocting things, you have to learn some fluency to be able to play. So it’s a long process, it’s not a simple process. It’s not a question of just learning how to read off a printed page the way a violist or oboe player would or something. You actually have to learn how to speak a language and be able to intuit various things and have a lot of stuff happen that you’re not even aware of what you’re doing. For instance, you don’t know what your mouth is doing as you’re saying words. You don’t know what it’s doing, but it’s doing it. Same thing with your right hand when you play banjo.

So it’s quite a long hill to climb, and it was a big deal in my life when I, first of all, realized that I could do it, and I was one of the few people around, in New York City or anywhere really. But all the professional players there were, were people who had gone through the same process, because Earl Scruggs had no idea how to show anybody what he was doing, doesn’t know how to describe what he does. And the people who learned, learned the same way I did, from listening to records and experimenting.

You know, this is jumping ahead in my bio, but in 1973, somebody gave me the idea to offer to do a banjo instruction book for a major music publisher, which I did. And they accepted my proposal, and I wrote this book, and the book was the first book to ever come along that explained—at least as much as could be explained—about how to teach yourself this style. So the book became quite a big seller, and that’s what opened up the door in a big way to me having a music career is that I was making enough money from the instructional book to create some open space in my life. That’s you know, like I say, I’m getting ahead in my bio, but that’s what allowed me to move to Colorado. It was on the heels of that book’s success and to try a career in music, even though I had already set myself up for a career in academia by that time.

(Oh, what were you—?)

I have a doctorate in Sociology, and I earned the doctorate in Sociology – I received it in the same year that I wrote the instruction book, and within a couple of years I had left the Sociology scene behind. I was a sociologist at Cornell.

18:21 (So when did you move to Colorado?)

We moved here in ’76 when I was 30 years old.

(And you had met Joan by that time?)

Yes. Joan and I met the summer when I was 23 years old in 1969. I had a break from my studies. I had just passed my oral examinations for my doctorate, and I had several

Page 6 of 18 months off. I had only recently learned to drive, because in New York City teenagers don’t make a point of learning how to drive ‘cause you don’t have a car anyway. But in my early ‘20s I learned to drive, got a very small sports car, a Triumph Spitfire, just a teeny little thing and started making my way across the country, visiting people. I had a friend in Boulder who I came to visit, and I almost couldn’t find him, and I was just about to leave town when somebody overheard me asking his name and said, “I know him,” and we linked up.

And Joan, who at the time was going by the name “Nondi”—I met Nondi because she was a friend of this friend of mine, Fred, so we just met briefly. And I was really on my way to California, but after we’d gotten to know each other a little bit, and we started a correspondence going, and there I was out in California. After a couple of months, I thought it would be pretty cool if I would come back and see her. So I came back in that same little car, and that’s when we sort of took up and started—being an item you might say—and started living together. It was in August of ’69. And then after a while in Colorado, we decided to back out to California. During that time the car died, so had to do the last part as hitchhikers.

Then when September came along, and I had to get back to my studies at Columbia, very pleasantly, she was willing to come along with me. So we continued, and we were living in New York City, but I wanted to relocate out of New York City by that time, because New York City was just getting, it seemed, too crazy for me. I wanted a more rural type of setting, a less citified type of setting. So, with only my dissertation yet to do in my academics, I got in touch with a lot of different places that had programs having to do with population, which was the interest I had developed – I wanted to work on population-related sociology. Cornell gave me a setup that worked for me so that was place we ended up going. We moved to Ithaca, New York, in 1970.

21:09 (Ithaca, New York?)

Yeah. So we moved to Ithaca in 1970 from New York City, and we ended up staying there for six years. It was during that time that I completed my doctoral thesis, and I got my doctorate from Columbia, because I was enrolled at Columbia but I was also working at Cornell. In Ithaca was also when I got together the first group that sort of went someplace you might say. I’d been in one group in college, in graduate school down in New York City, that had some really good people in it, but we never made records or anything. We did some performing. That band went by the name of the Orange Mountain Boys. Prior to that I had a little group at Columbia which was called the Morningside Mountain Boys. Back then if you had a band, a lot of the most famous bands were the Something-or-Other Mountain Boys, so we were the Morningside Mountain Boys because Columbia is on Morningside Heights in Manhattan.

Anyway, those were the two groups that I had and then in 1970 we ended up in Ithaca and I found some good musicians around then, and we started a band called Country Cooking that Nondi and I had. She was the singer, and I was the banjo player and we had some very good musicians.

Page 7 of 18

In the year ’71, I got the notion—we had some friends up there who had started a record company and were actually putting out vinyl records of bluegrassy sorts of stuff. So I proposed that there be an instrumental record where I and one of the other people in Country Cooking, another banjo player whose name was . He was a member of the band and we played all sorts of different stuff, bluegrass and sort of kind of stuff. Anyway—but we had some good banjo arrangements that we had worked on, and I proposed that we make a twin banjo record, and this record company said, “Sure.”

We ended up making this record just using two microphones, in a quiet room with the instrumentalists who were in this band that we had and a couple of other people from out of town. This record was called Country Cooking: Fourteen Bluegrass Instrumentals, and it really did very well. The record label, which we were only the third record they put out, but it was called Rounder Records, which is now one of the bigger independent record labels anywhere. They put out thousands of records. But we were the third one they put out. The number on it was 0006. It did rather well, because there wasn’t anything quite like that, and we were young, “progressive” musicians playing bluegrass with some of our own creativity being demonstrated. We weren’t just there to copy previous styles, we had some of our own ideas.

So the record did well. It became a “Book of the Month Club” selection amazingly enough, years down the line, and sold well over 30,000 copies, which is pretty successful for a small label. It was an important turning point, because everybody in that group of instrumentalists was very talented, and this one record gave everybody a chance to start thinking, “Gee, you mean we’re not just a bunch of idiots sitting around in Ithaca, New York. There’s people around the country and even overseas who like this enough to want to listen to it?” It gave us all the idea that we could maybe have a career in music. And this band didn’t go that far as having a career in music but individually, everybody ended up making records with other people, or this band got to make another couple of records. But everybody, at some point or another, took a shot at a music career, including me.

25:03 I was given a large amount of courage on that, because the royalties from this instructional book were as much as I needed to live on. And the same company asked me to do a book, so I then put out a bluegrass songbook where I collected a bunch of famous bluegrass songs and wrote them out for accessibility to the market, and that book has sold over 100,000 copies. So between the two books, about a third of a million copies have sold, and they continue to be a portion of my income. At that time, there was enough to live on, just from the books.

So there we were in Ithaca, enjoying living there but also noticing that we didn’t like the climate there at all. On a beautiful day, you couldn’t ask for a more beautiful place, but the whole winter was gray, icy, snowy, not much fun for months of the year. Then sometimes it was way too humid and rainy the rest of the year. So, coming up on age 30, I remember thinking, “If I’m not going to live here the rest of my life, where am I going to live?” And we started talking about where else we might live. By this time we’d

Page 8 of 18 gotten married, and Joan’s originally from Colorado. We met in Colorado. And I thought maybe Colorado would be a good place to move.

So the last year of our band, Country Cooking, 1975, we worked up a tour that included some dates in Colorado, and that was our excuse to go out here. So in the summer of 1975, we were out in Colorado and took some gigs in the mountains and played the Fifth Annual Rocky Mountain Bluegrass Festival with our band, Country Cooking. I remember saying to myself, “Yeah, this is definitely a good place to move to.” There’s a good music scene happening there. Denver had the Denver Folklore Center, which was a very active hub. They had everything from a music store to instrument repair shop, concert hall, record store, even bead shop. It was like a hippie shopping center with music as the centerpiece, and there were some very good musicians around here.

So it seemed like a community where I could maybe get a career in music launched if I moved here. And Nondi was willing, her family was already here, and so we moved out in February of ’76 with the intention of getting a place something like what we had in Ithaca, which was an old farmhouse outside of the main part of town. But we decided to move to Denver at first just have a home base to kind of explore the state from. So we lived the first six months in Denver, in an apartment near City Park.

I remember one day looking in the paper in Boulder, just for rural property, and there’s this two-and-a-half acres near IBM, “handyman’s dream” or something like that it said, and it was this house. Except that it was not the way this house is now, it was the way this house was in 1976. It was a 1910 farmhouse that had been deposited on this property. There is a 20-acre parcel that had been broken into four pieces, and the original house is still here, and then three additional houses were moved here from town, and they were old, modest farm houses, and that was our house, built in 1910 and moved here in the 1950s.

28:41 (Where was it moved from?)

I don’t know exactly, but Longmont is what I remember hearing. If you drive in the rural areas around say, Weld County, you’ll see a lot of houses that have similar architectural features to that. There’s a kind of a hut sort of—you know, it’s a single story thing and the roof line has a kind of a nice little curve to it, and the old style siding. The only thing was that it hadn’t had much attention paid to it, and the windows were rotting, and just everything needed replacing, that’s why it said “handyman’s dream.” The part that I liked was that the price tag on it was $44,000 for two-and-a-half acres, and it said, “Left Hand Creek crosses the property,” and before I saw it I thought, “This place is going to have to be really, really terrible for me not to want to move here.” Because we were already living in an old farmhouse, so that didn’t scare me at all. And I thought, “Two and a half acres in Colorado with a creek in the back and a beautiful view of the mountains, these tall trees.” It was just an idyllic place and we got a thousand dollars off on the price. So we bought for $43,000 back then. No bank would go in on a loan, because it didn’t have central heating, and it was just not in good shape, the roof was bad. So we ended up having to finance it through the seller, who did not give us a very good

Page 9 of 18 rate. We were paying $309 a month, which seemed really high at the time, but we figured it was worth it.

Anyway, we got our 30-year mortgage for $309 a month and commenced to live here. When we got here the place was totally grown up in weeds, six-foot weeds everywhere you looked, ‘cause the people living here weren’t interested in keeping it up, they were on their way out. For history’s sake, three years previous is when they had bought the property for $24,000, and it just gives people fits to hear how much a property like this could have gone and bought for back when.

30:52 (What was the original farm property that this was—?)

Was it the Cowes [?] It was the Cowes family and Stewart and Josie Poet still live in the house that they were living in there, just to the east of us when we first moved here. That’s the original farmhouse. It’s from about 1890 I understand. And, you know, the chicken coop from that property and the septic is on our part, when they divided up the property, we have some old fence posts and some old stuff that went with the original house, but that’s on our property now.

(Can we fast forward to when you got involved with putting together Hot Rize?)

Sure. In 1976 is when I first came out here, and the first thing I wanted to do as was my practice anywhere I ever went, would be to find other people to play bluegrass music with. A guy I met at Folklore Center named was a very fine guitar player and he had been in a band previous to that, and we said, “Wouldn’t it be fun to just have an informal group.”

We set up this thing where every Tuesday night we’d play the Denver Folklore Center concert hall with a band that we steadfastly refused to give a consistent name to. We would either call it the Rambling Drifters or the Drifting Ramblers or other variants on those names. The idea was informality ruled.

There was another guy in the band named Warren Kennison. The three of us were the core of the band, but we’d have different bass players at different times, and different people would join in and play with us. Over the two years that we played every Tuesday night at the Folklore Center, we counted up probably a dozen different musicians who would come in and guest with us. Among those musicians was a very talented young guy, Tim O’Brien, who had won the Colorado State Championship and was also a very good player and very good singer, although nobody seemed to take a note of his singing being anything special. But I did. I said, “This guy’s an incredible singer.” But he wasn’t even given an important singing role in the band that he was in at the time.

Another guy was Nick Forster, who later became a guy in Hot Rize, and he was a versatile guy. Both of those were younger than me and Charles by almost ten years, but they were some of the best musicians we got to play with.

Page 10 of 18 In the year 1977, I said to myself, “It’s time to try to launch whatever music career I’m trying to do here, and I need to make a solo record of my own compositions and whatnot.” I had an idea for a variant on bluegrass music that would be stripped down version with just three instruments: banjo, mandolin and bass. I asked Tim O’Brien if he would help me make a demo recording to show to a record company to show the ideas that I’d like to record. So he came up here and another guy who was in the band that he was in named Dwayne Webster on bass, the three of us started making recordings on a recording machine I had. We did it right here in the living room. We actually called it Niwot Music, because it wasn’t exactly bluegrass, because instead of having a full five- piece bluegrass complement of instruments we had just banjo, which I was playing through a certain sound effect called a phase shifter which changed the sound a little bit—and then mandolin and bass. And that was a unique formula so I decided to call it a new kind of music. Instead of just saying this was a little invention we have, I said this is called Niwot Music because we were doing it in Niwot.

34:51 (Where were you doing it in Niwot?)

Right here in this living room. We weren’t performing it. We were just making these recordings to impress a record company that there was a reason to put out a record of me and my banjo playing. So they said, “Yes.” This was a record company in Chicago called Flying Fish Records that had put out one of the Country Cooking records, and they were willing to put out this record of me and these guys playing “Niwot Music.” So that was Tim O’Brien helping me and this other guy Dwayne.

Anyway, there’s a huge amount of detail I’ll just skip over. I’m getting you the main points of the story which is—well, along the way—Tim was only 23 in the year 1977, and I was 31 at that time. But he had won this fiddle contest, both Wyoming and Colorado state champ fiddle player. And there was a Colorado outfit that asked him to make a record of fiddle stuff and some of his singing, and he asked me to be on that. And then Charles, the guy from the Rambling Drifters, was also a part of both records. So when the records were recorded and getting ready to come out, at this point Tim had moved to Minnesota to get married to a girl he met here who was from Minnesota. Now he was living in Minnesota, but I called him up and said, “Why don’t you come back here and we’ll start a group and we’ll promote our two records that we’re on with Charles.” And so, Tim thought about it and decided to come back, and we’d start the group.

So that’s what happened. In 1978, January, we finally got everybody in one place. There was a fourth guy, a very splendid guitar player, named Mike Skapp [?] who was sort of, oh, an unusual personality that didn’t mesh well in groups unfortunately. And even though he was a great guitar player, he never lasted very long in any band he was in, and he didn’t last long in our band. When he quit, we replaced him with Nick Forster, the guy I mentioned who we knew from the Folklore Center. So we had me and Tim, Charles on guitar, and then Nick became our bass player. That was the four-person group and that group stayed together for 12 years. And that’s a pretty important chapter in bluegrass history I’m proud to say, Hot Rize.

Page 11 of 18 37:25 (Would you point out the members of your group? [looking at photograph])

That’s me, that’s Tim, that’s Nick and that’s Charles. And this picture was taken about ten years after we started the band. When we started the band we had a lot of musical talent but we, other than me and Charles, not much music business experience. Both Nick and Tim were around 23 at the time, and while they were very good musicians, we were all pretty green in terms of knowing what to do as [far as] trying to make a living the music business. I had been on a few records, and I was kind of supported by my instructional books and stuff, but we were all very intent on seeing if we could make something big happen with this band. We bought a traveling car. We had a 1969 Cadillac. We got an old U-Haul trailer that Charles painted to match the two-tone black- and-white Cadillac. We had a very fancy looking traveling rig with us, a big old boat of a car and then the trailer behind carrying our sound system.

And I knew how to get gigs, get on the phone and get people interested in hiring us. At first I tried to have somebody working for us as an agent but I knew I’d do a better job, and I ended up being the agent for the band. I spent part of every day making phone calls and trying to find us work. Part of the idea was that if I could just keep us working every single week, then nobody in the band would be tempted to work with any other band. And Tim, because of his multiple skills, was often asked to do stuff but my strategy was to keep him too busy to do anything with anybody else, and I succeeded.

We even, by the end of the year, thanks to some old contacts that I had, we were able to play some festivals back East, and we got invited to various regional events around Colorado. We got to play quite a few—the main places that you had to play then if you were a bluegrass band was some place where they had music—maybe they had folk music or rock music or something, but these music clubs.

[Looking at a photo] There’s a picture of us a few years into our career, playing in Kentucky at a major festival down there. A lot of the places we played around here were bars, basically, where you’d play from 9:00 [pm] to 1:00 [am]. A lot of people liked our band, and we’d get good crowds but our crowd was not what you’d call a drinking crowd. So the club owners liked to see all these people coming to see us, but they weren’t buying much alcohol, and we would end up losing our job there even though we could draw a lot of people. We pretty much exhausted all the places like that in Colorado or at least in our part of Colorado. Back then people wouldn’t dance, at least around here, they wouldn’t get up and dance to bluegrass music.

[Looking at another picture] Now what you’ve got there, that’s our alter-ego band. That came along quite some time later. That’s when we would change out of the suits that were part of our bluegrass garb and change our outfits and play a different kind of music from bluegrass, using different instruments, electric instruments, sort of patterned after the music that Hank Williams and Bob Wills would make around the year 1950 or so. We had that kind of music as part of what we did. We did that kind of music from the beginning but we got the notion to sort of dress up and add some comedic elements to it as time went on. And so there’d be a time in every show where we would leave the stage

Page 12 of 18 and relinquish it to this other band called Red Knuckles & the Trailblazers. Then people were in store for a different kind of music although still a country kind of music. Then there were these comedic elements to it. So the combination of the two bands as part of the show, Hot Rize and Red Knuckles, made a pretty powerful entertainment package.

We did our experimenting with that locally and, in fact, I guess I was mentioning, we had exhausted all the bars, they weren’t hiring us because we couldn’t get people up and dancing—if they would dance, they would drink—but we couldn’t get them dancing, they would just sit there and listen to us. So we were not a good fit for those but then Nondi suggested that we use the Grange Hall here in Niwot and just play there, just have concerts there and not worry about having to sell alcohol or anything. So we tried that, and it didn’t take off right away but eventually it did take off. We could fill the Grange Hall two nights on a weekend or even three, pretty regularly, and there was not an issue of alcohol because you were not allowed to have alcohol in the Grange anyway. But we could actually make pretty good money just charging admission here, and so the Grange Hall in Niwot became our home base. Anytime we knew we were going to be around town, we would maybe have two weekends in a row playing the Grange Hall.

43:13 (Where are some of the places you went that are particularly interesting, for concerts?)

You mean outside the state?

(Mm-hmm.)

Well, in 1980 we got asked to do a European tour just on the strength of the first record we’d made. The guy didn’t know anything about us except he heard this record, and he wanted to bring us to Europe, so we got to play in France and Holland and Sweden and Denmark when the band had only been together for two months—I mean two years, I’m sorry, 1980. So that was really fun, a really special thing for us to have a chance to go travel abroad and be able to come back to Colorado as people who had been asked to play in Europe, you know. That made us special among Colorado musicians.

We played an important bluegrass festival called Indian Springs in Maryland in the first September of the band in 1978 and there’s a major national bluegrass magazine called that thought of us as a bright new light on the scene and put us on the cover of their magazine the very first year of the band. That gave us a very nice boost. When the record finally came out which was two years or so from when we first put together the band – the first record didn’t come out until two years later, but when it came out, it got great reviews all over the place, and we were able to advertise ourselves as an important new part of the bluegrass scene. A lot of it had to do with Tim’s great singing. He’s just a tremendous singer and he had not been recognized at all as a singer before but now he was front and center as a great lead singer and then he also, at my suggestion – I said, “Well, we need to start writing songs that’ll be our bands songs.” And he hadn’t tried writing songs before but he became a very good song writer real fast, and we had some songs that are now classics in bluegrass that Tim wrote.

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45:12 (Could you play just a couple of brief --?)

Well, the second one he ever wrote I think is one called Nellie Kane [starts strumming banjo] and—this is not my key to sing in but then I’ll kind of give you an idea. [Sings: “As a young man I went riding out on the Western Plains,” etc]. And still when we play together that song might come up, and that was written in the very first year of Hot Rize.

(How long did Hot Rize stay together?)

Well, twelve years from the time Nick joined the band. He joined the band on May 1st 1978 and on April 30th 1990 was our last gig, when we had completed twelve years. By this time we went out kind of at the top. That year we won “Entertainer of the Year,” which is the top award given to a bluegrass band. We also put out a record and that got a Grammy nomination when the Bluegrass Grammy was only a new thing on the scene.

The end of the band happened because Tim, who was doing so well as a singer and songwriter as part of our band—a couple of the songs that we had done got picked up by a well known country music singer name Kathy Mattea. One of them went to number two and other one was in the Top Ten for a long time of the country charts. It helped Tim get some recognition in Nashville. He was interested in seeing if he could become some kind of a country star singer. And there were people who said, “Yes, we think we can make that happen.” So he decided to deal with RCA Records which didn’t work out very well for him. The tides of the music business changed pretty fast, and he was considered a little too “folky” or something and not real star material for country music despite his amazing talents.

But in the meantime, with that happening, he gave notice to the band that he would stay with the band one more year, and the band finally ended in 1990. Tim’s career as a major country star never got to happen but he’s, over the years, developed a huge amount of respect as a sort of a folk artist. He’s very eclectic, he’s made Irish music records and lots of different things. His great singing ability and his wonderful song writing ability has taken him far. He’s written some songs that have earned him some really good pay. One of his songs is on a Garth Brooks record, so you get lots of money for that. So he’s had a great career.

And the limitation on Hot Rize—well, Hot Rize disbanded. In fact, Nick, who had been part of Hot Rize, joined Tim’s band when Tim started his new band.

48:59 (And what’s happened to Nick now?)

Nick has gone on to a lot of things. He stayed with Tim for a year or two but around that time he also got the notion to start a radio program that would be a special radio program and he and his wife, who has an acting background, the two of them combined forces to start this radio show called “E-Town.” That started, I believe, in the year 1991 in Boulder. And it’s still going today, it’s very successful, it’s on over 200 radio stations.

Page 14 of 18 Nick is not only the main MC but he also plays a variety of instruments with musical guests, and so he’s fashioned a major career for himself as a radio host and versatile musician.

But, after Hot Rize disbanded we were—it wouldn’t be an exaggeration to say that we were a beloved group, because we had some songs that really touched people’s hearts and we also could get people pretty hysterical during the show, laughing at the antics of Red Knuckles and the Trailblazers. We had a very complete entertainment package, you might say. It had a lot of virtuoso playing, it had a lot of creativity. We had a unique sound as a bluegrass band and very respected by people who wanted hard core bluegrass, not the modernized version. But we could play modern style bluegrass as well as very respectful hard core traditional base bluegrass music. So pretty much everybody liked Hot Rize. We gave a lot of reasons to like us. And when we disbanded, we were one of the best paid bands in the business, and a lot of people took it hard that we would choose to quit. We didn’t part on bad terms, everybody was willing to play together, but Tim had this job to do.

At a certain point, within a couple of years, people were saying, “Gee, do you think you guys could get together for a reunion? We’ll pay you really good money, if you’ll just play together again.” So we started playing reunion shows, and we were playing maybe a half dozen a year throughout the ‘90s. In one year, ’96, we chose to do about 20 gigs altogether, and we did a tour and on the last couple of days of the tour we played at Boulder Theater, and Nick arranged without our knowing it, to have it all recorded. A record came out of that, which I think is far and away our best record, because we were a very good stage band, and this captured what we sounded like when we weren’t self conscious about being in a recording studio. When you’re in a recording studio and you don’t have a crowd there, you don’t get the same mood that you’re in when you’re on stage. When we were in that good stage mood, we could deliver well and, in fact, our best selling stuff is our live stuff actually. So we put out a record based on 1996 recordings.

By something about 1994 or so, Charles found out he had leukemia, and it didn’t debilitate him very much at all at first, but it was understood that it would kill him if he didn’t maybe have a bone marrow transplant. So he undertook a bone marrow transplant, I believe in 1997, and it actually succeeded in eradicating the leukemia, but it also weakened him so badly that he succumbed, and he died from a lung infection in 1999. That was now 21 years from when the four of us first became a band and there had never been anybody else called Hot Rize for 21 years and, as a reunion band, we were one of the top paid bands and very successful but only playing a few times a year. Once Charles died we didn’t know really what to do about Hot Rize, couldn’t imagine doing anything without Charles.

But when this record came out—which took a long time to happen. It’s a long story, but it took six years before that record, made in ’96, came out, and it came out in ’02. With the release of that record with Charles on it and the great retrospective of our band, we decided to play some gigs and we got somebody else to play guitar, a guy named Bryan

Page 15 of 18 Sutton, who is pretty much the top bluegrass guitar player, wins Guitar Player of the Year pretty much regularly these days. Great guitar player, and he filled in very well for Charles.

Anyway, since 2002 we’ve had the same three—me and Nick and Tim—and now with as the fourth member of the band. We play not as many as—probably eight shows in one year and sometimes it’s only two shows per year, mainly because Tim doesn’t have time to do a lot of other stuff. He has a lot of other fish to fry, but he likes doing Hot Rize, and it’s still a very popular thing when we do it. All the way from 2002 to this year, 2007, we’ve always played a number of gigs as Hot Rize with Brian on guitar, and that’s looking to continue. We have one gig so far scheduled. I don’t know how many there’ll be but Hot Rize is, you know, living a very limited occasional existence, but when we hit the stage, people usually tell us, “Geez, doesn’t sound like you’ve ever stopped.” Cause we fit together so well, we have 30 years of musical history together, the three of us.

55:02 You asked before about the name Hot Rize. When the band hadn’t even yet assembled, I remembered that I—it’s hard to figure out a name for a band so I always carry this little pad with me. My dad had suggested that long ago. He said, “Writers always have something to write on, and when they have an idea, they’ll write down the idea.” So I carried with me a pad and one day, driving into Denver, I remember thinking, Hot Rize, that’s the secret ingredient of Martha White Flour and there’s a famous jingle that Flatt and Scruggs used to sing—that was their sponsor. So they’d say, “Martha White self-rising flours got hot rize,” and it was this cute little song that they did. And I thought, “Hot Rize, that would be a good name for a band.” I wrote it down. This was when there wasn’t any band to name it from, but it was just an idea. I kept creative ideas in a file, and I remembered, “Oh, I have some band names” and so I looked it up, and there’s Hot Rize sitting there, and I said, “Oh, yeah, let’s see if the guys in the band would be okay with that.” They all said, “Fine.”

But the name was owned by the Martha White Flour Company, so I had to get in touch with them to see what they thought about our using the name. They actually said right away that they thought it would be fine except for one stipulation, you have to keep the show clean. [chuckles] Which was not an issue.

So we said, “Sure, we’ll keep the show clean.”

And they said, “Well, then you can use the name.”

When we got to play, three years later, when the band was really interested in some big exposure, we got to play the Grand Old Opry, because they helped arrange that to happen. They let us use the design of their flour package as a tee-shirt and we sold thousands and thousands of those tee-shirts and still do. They never made us pay them anything for the use of that and, in fact, they would even buy 20 shirts at a time from us and pay us full price for the shirts. And, of course, they were happy to be getting their name out all over the place. And it’s still a popular brand of flour that has a leavening

Page 16 of 18 ingredient in it that is sort of altitude-dependent, and it doesn’t work in Colorado [laughs]. So here we are, really making them famous in Colorado where they can’t even sell the product, but it still sells real well elsewhere.

57:24 (Over the years you have met with . How did ever—?)

Well, not that much over the years. I just happened to be reading in Banjo News Magazine, they had an interview with him, and the interviewer asked him who were some of his favorite players, and he started talking about—he didn’t remember my name – but he said, “Are you familiar with Hot Rize?”

The interviewer says, “Yes.”

“The guy who plays with them, I just love his playing.”

He went on and on about me. So I was pretty happy to hear that, ‘cause Steve is a very good banjo player and, of course, he’s famous for playing the banjo, among other things. So getting in touch with him was quite a job. Just getting in touch with him through his agency didn’t really seem to work but I have a mutual friend, a guy I knew who was old friends with Steve. I ran into him, and I said, “How do I get a message to Steve Martin?”

He says, “Email it to me, and I’ll forward it to Steve, and if he wants he’ll answer you.”

So Steve got back in touch with me, and I said, “Well I get to New York sometimes”— that’s where I’m from—“and would you like to get together?”

And he says, “Oh, I’d love to get together, we can have a little party or something. We’ll have a music party.”

So at the next opportunity, that’s what happened. So we went to his fancy place on Central Park West and got to meet the famous guy, and he was at least as nervous as I was, strangely enough. I found that he is a very humble and somewhat shy person as well as being a very talented person, and I came to realize that he held musicians in really very high esteem and, like I say, about as stoked to meet me as I was to meet him.

(We’ve got two minutes.)

Yeah. And then we’re done, done? Okay, well, anyway, we had a good time at that party. I became aware of some things in his playing that he’d probably like to improve, and I suggested that I could help him improve with that. He was very open to that. So last summer, the summer of ’06, I went out to his house, spent a few days with him, working on his playing. I guess something to include is this thing that happened in ’05, when we got to be on the David Letterman Show together. This was just an idea he had, not to be on Letterman but there’s a festival—he has a connection with The New Yorker magazine and they have a festival called The New Yorker Festival, and they invited him to have a program featuring banjo players. Or maybe he had the idea. But anyway, he

Page 17 of 18 decided to get together, himself and a few other players, and he included me and Earl Scruggs and two other people. We put on a show at The New Yorker Festival, and then the Letterman performance came about as a result of that. So we got to be on TV in September of ’05, playing “Foggy Mountain Breakdown” right there with Earl Scruggs. And it was a big highlight for me.

(Thank you, Pete. I really appreciate your taking the time. This has been fascinating)

Thank you.

(You have had an interesting career.)

60:48 [ End of Tape A. End of Interview.]

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